Posted on 10/13/2006 8:06:31 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
After Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed a bunch more this summer...after Israel responded with its assault on Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon...after Israel's stock market dropped 10 percent in the first week of...a strange thing happened to Israel's capital markets: nothing.
The stocks quickly recovered almost all their early losses. So did those in Egypt, Kuwait, Dubai, and Qatar. Even the Saudi Tadawul, which shed more than 6 percent in the days after the fighting started, climbed soon after (and 6 percent wasn't that big a deal since it had doubled last year and was looking to resettle).
Still, the resilience was most vivid in Israel. Three weeks after combat began, the Tel Aviv 100 was actually up 6 percent. The banking, health-care, and technology sectors that have led the country to an unbelievable run over the last decade marched on all but unaffected by the fighting. It's an economy that, after five sluggish decades of being slowed by socialist leanings and questions about its survival, seems ready to roar.
See, I have a theory about companies that do business in tough places: If they can survive rockets falling on the roofs of their bomb shelters, their elbows will certainly be sharp enough to handle competitors with neckties and spreadsheets.
Mairs and Power Growth is a mutual fund in Minnesota. It charges no load and always beats its benchmark, surpassing the S&P 500 by 6.5 percent over the last five years. Its secret is so simple that it's irritating: MPGFX holds a ridiculous portion of Minnesota-based companies, on the conviction that a local company that manages to go nationwide must be lean and well run to have made it beyond that state's unfriendly business climate.
Well, Haifa and Nahariyya provide new color to the phrase "unfriendly business climate." In 1992, foreign investors put about $537 million at risk in Israel. By 2003, that number had multiplied more than tenfold, to $5.5 billion. This year, in paying $4 billion for 80 percent of a metals company called Iscar, Warren Buffett—the golden calf of cautious investing—nearly equaled that figure in a single transaction (Buffett's first international purchase ever). Israel's GDP grew 5.2 percent last year and is expected to do the same this year, war notwithstanding. There are more Israeli companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange than companies from any other foreign country. Israel has more start-up companies than any country in the world except the U. S. And many of those companies are strong. Teva Pharmaceutical, the banks Hapoalim and Leumi, the Internet-security firm Check Point, and the holding company Koor Industries are homegrown; Microsoft and Intel are among the companies that take advantage of tech guys leaving the Israeli military with advanced training.
Still, many stocks remain on sale. Israeli companies function like modern Western corporations, but their stocks trade like those in emerging markets. In the wake of the recent fighting, the TA-25—Israel's equivalent of the Dow—was selling for 13 times estimated 2006 earnings, right about where emerging markets overall can be bought.
My favorite individual stocks are Magal, which makes the perimeter and border-security fences that seem to be in demand all over the world, and Koor Industries, which is a diversified chemical and telecom concern that evolved from a utopian vision to a streamlined capitalist conglomerate. I own neither stock, for the same reason—fear—I also haven't bought property in Beirut, which had returned better than 50 percent this year alone before the fighting began. But if I had a lot more dough, I'd be throwing it into the Middle East. And praying that people there somehow glimpse a future without the violence we see now.
Appears Like George Soros Agrees:
HALLIBURTON CO 252,500 SH (Iraq)
LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES 5,229,200 SH (Iraq)
Arel Communications and Software Ltd.(another Soros holding in Iraq) the investee companies in which the Company had ownership interests during the fiscal year ended December 31, 2002, the principal business of each and the percentage of equity owned, directly or indirectly, by AMPAL-AMERICAN ISRAEL CORPORATION
Soros is part of a circle which includes Marc Rich of Zug, Switzerland and Tel Aviv, the indicted metals and commodity speculator and fugitive; Shaul Eisenberg, the secretive Israeli arms and commodities dealer; and "Dirty Rafi" Eytan - both linked to the financial side of the Israeli Mossad, and to the family of Jacob Lord Rothschild.
The myth has been created Soros is a lone investment "genius" who has become one of the world' s most successful speculators. According to those who have done business with him, he never makes a major investment move, whether against the pound or the franc or gold, without sensitive, high-level insider information. On the board of directors of Soros's Quantum Fund N.V. is Richard Katz, on the board of the London N.M. Rothschild & Sons merchant bank, and head of Rothschild Italia S.p.A. of Milan; Nils O. Taube a partner in the London investment group, St. James Place Capital, who's major partner again is Lord Rothschild.
Soros (member of the Hofjuden, or "Court Jews," powerful, secretive network of aristocratic old families) and Rothschild are reported having ties to Israeli intelligence, as well as to British and American.
U.S. intelligence sources charged that Soros maintains access to a 'hot money" crowd in Israel, politically associated with the Eretz Yisroel goals of Gen. Ariel Sharon. These provide some leads as to how Soros was able to beat the Bundesbank and destroy the ERM [Exchange Rate Mechanism].
Board members of the NGOs Soros organises and finances are (example): Human Rights' Morton Abramowitz, US assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research from 1985-89, and fellow at the interventionist Council on Foreign Relations; ex-ambassador Warren Zimmerman (whose spell in Yugoslavia coincided with the break-up of that country); and Paul Goble, director of communications at the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which Soros also funds). Soros's International Crisis Group has "independent" luminaries: former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Allen, Gen Wesley Clark, once Nato supreme allied commander for Europe.
Neil Clark, in an incisive article in the New Statesman (June 2, 2003)states: "Soros is angry not at Bush's aims---of expanding Pax Americana and making the world safe for global capitalists like himself - but with the crass and blundering way Bush is going about it. By making U.S. ambitions so clear, the Bush gang has committed the cardinal sin of giving the game away. For years, Soros and his NGOs have gone about their work extending the boundaries of the 'free world' so skillfully that hardly anyone noticed. Now a Texan redneck and a gang of overzealous neo-cons have blown it".
if the ERM was destroyable then it should have been destroyed. and if the bundesbank was "beatable" it should have been beaten.
I thought so..
Very, very cool. Please remember me when you post--
Have you in the soros file .....you and george now share a file~
(brrrr)! :->
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.